Snowmen on the march.

Snowmen on the march.

The demise of the inn's Christmas tree each year marks the arrival of an invasion of snowmen at the inn. 10 years ago, (it does not seem like that long ago) after we removed the first Christmas tree from the inn, we noticed how barren the inn looked. From being filled with holiday decorations one day, to being just the plain inn the next, it was obvious that something was missing. Thus began Mary's quest to collect snowmen to decorate the inn.

I have lost track of the number of snowmen Mary has in the collection. They include stuffed snowmen, china snowmen, fiberglass snowmen, blown glass snowmen, snowmen that dance, snowmen that sing, snowmen snow globes, snowmen trivets...you name it... if it has a snowman associated with it, Mary probably has it.

It's all in great fun of course. The snowmen will take center stage at the inn over the next couple of weeks. They will morph slightly with the season, taking on the hearts of Valentines Day and a bit of the Irish on St Patrick's day. Winter, after all, does march into spring.

Talking about spring, today's temperatures at Killington are kicking at 50. We skied a few runs this morning, mostly for a little exercise to keep the holiday pounds from settling. Surface conditions were a combination of spring crust in low traffic and shady areas, to spring corn where skiers and riders had broken the surface up. It looks like one more day of warm before winter comes back to the area on Thursday. The resort had made so much snow earlier in the season that the base should survive this warm up. (I am sure that lesser mountains in the Northeast are not quite as lucky.)

(A little commentary) It will be interesting to see the snow guns turn back on at Killington come Wednesday night or Thursday. The new resort owners, Powdr, early strategy was to make lots of snow on a trail then move to the next. Will that same strategy exist as they try to refresh the mountain, or will they attempt to broadly distribute snow across all of the resorts open terrain? No matter which approach they take, even in the face of a very strong January thaw, we are still skiing at Killington. I suspect Killington will offer the most open terrain in the east this coming weekend. It will be interesting to watch.

Let it snow!